Continuing through April 5, 2026

Spanning the years from 1965 to 1987, “Foundations” focuses on the transition Viola Frey made in the early years of her career from painting to sculpture, and into the monumental figurative works for which she is best known. The show’s spiral layout, curator Emilee Enders explains, was inspired by recurring imagery in Frey’s body of work, and was a natural fit for the circular gallery.

The sleepy central valley town of Lodi, California would at first seem an unlikely locale to engender such a major talent. Indeed, Frey (1933-2004), who grew up on a grape farm, couldn’t wait to get out. Once she did, her work came to be widely considered central to the West Coast clay revolution, which redefined the medium as a fine art form. 

While attending the California College of Arts and Crafts (now the California College of the Arts), Frey studied with Richard Diebenkorn, briefly on the painting faculty, as well as with Vernon “Corky” Coykendall who taught wheel-throwing, and Charles Fiske, who taught hand-building. She left the Bay Area to attend graduate school at Tulane University, studying painting with Mark Rothko, who greatly influenced her use of color, and clay with Katherine Choy, a gifted ceramic sculptor. She then relocated to New York during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism where a thorough lack of support there for clay, for figuration, and for female artists all fed her resolve to head back to California.

Frey returned to the Bay Area in 1960. Soon after she purchased a home on Divisadero Street, her former teacher Fiske moved in. Fiske not only knew his way around a lump of clay, but was a gifted writer, an intellectual, and he was to remain her domestic partner and champion until his passing in 2001. While far from a traditional relationship, theirs was clearly a close and mutually supportive bond, one which some now frame in the context of “queer kinships.” Able to express Frey’s vision in the highly sophisticated, poetic kind of language that appealed to gallerists and art world cognoscenti, Fiske drew on the work of French structuralist Claude Lévi-Strauss, and the term bricoleur (literally “handyperson”) soon became associated with the artist’s work.

When urban renewal devastated the Western Addition neighborhood in 1975, Frey moved to Oakland. It was here that she established her indoor and, crucially, backyard studios that served her so well for the rest of her life. She further expanded into much larger warehouse studio spaces near her Oakland home in 1983 and 1996.

Her favorite excursion was to the nearby Alameda Flea Market, where she would take photographs as she scoured the booths for the kitschy figurines that obsessed her. Near the entrance to the survey are “Alameda Flea Market I and III” (1970), lively monochromatic acrylic works on paper. Here Frey used a ceramic technique, sgraffito, scratching images into the paint to reveal surface beneath. These convey fully realized scenes with an economy of means, with quirky figures enmeshed in a jumbled environment of junker cars, furniture bits, and assorted flotsam. The selection of works on paper here reveals her beautiful line quality, love of figure drawing, and that Rothko-inspired color sense.  

The figurative sculptural works that Frey has been best known for display a unique, rough-hewn aesthetic. “Woman in White Chair“ (1965), the show’s earliest sculptural work, presents a contorted brown figure embedded in a lumpy white chair, its abject awkwardness countered by a sure-footedness and sense of conviction in touch. The figure’s arm bends over her head, which twists and inclines to the left and over the arm of the chair. The raw energy of the work recalls Auguste Rodin, whose commanding sculptures likewise appear the result of a tempestuous if not entirely unpleasant struggle with the material at hand.

A quintet of small glazed ceramic works dating from the late 60s reveal Frey’s vessels transforming from functional objects to sculptural forms. Surfaces glow with vibrant glaze in jewel tones. A surrealistic “Untitled (Green Goblet with Suspended Pink Woman)” (1970) sprouts pink legs shod in purple heels, while a torso extending from the opposite side serves as a handle, a playful yet disturbing, use of form. 

Animals at risk appear in some of her work, as in “Non-Endangered Beaver” (1973), which also marked her move into larger scale, standing at eye-height on a low pedestal. Its goofy expression is at once funny, sad, and confrontational. The haunting “Junkyard Dream” (1975) offers a poignant portrait of a child (Frey herself) in a slumping chair with wheels. The child’s sleeping face is almost grotesque, yet also sweet and innocent. A rabbit with protruding buck teeth nestling in the child’s lap is by contrast wide awake. With chubby legs spread, and her skirt riding up to expose pale underwear, the child appears painfully vulnerable. Frey, always rather tight-lipped regarding her childhood on the farm, shared a bedroom with her three brothers, a difficult arrangement at best.

Frey created a plethora of assemblages from her extensive collection of figurines, which she documented in 35mm slide format, here printed as giclées. She also painted a number of gouaches of the same subject matter, a variety of surreal, dark, and sexualized tableaux of chotchkes such as mass-produced Venus de Milo miniatures, Barbie and Ken-type dolls, ceramic chickens, and a small wicker chair as a prop.

Painting remained an important creative outlet throughout Frey’s career. “Studio View: Man in Doorway” (1983) consists of three abutted canvases, each about 8 3/4’ by 4 1/2’, the entire impressive work nearly 14 feet long. With its Cubist space, Expressionist palette and dynamic figures exploding outward as in Futurism, it’s effectively a condensed history of modernist painting. A giant male figure in a blue suit exits the scene above, while below, a crouching man in a tan suit approaches a sultry female figure clad in black garments, a glimpse of a mysterious sexual encounter/power play.

Three large figures anchor the floor of exhibition, the life-sized “Untitled (Grandmother Series)” (1978), a vibrant figure sporting a remarkable dress in a floral pattern of black, red, and green, with yellow piping; “Largest Grandmother” (1987), an Amazonian woman, ten feet tall, in a skirt suit with a prominent spiral pattern; and a towering “Leaning Man III” (1984-85), looming large in his blue suit, white shirt and red tie, is a hulking and Golem-like everyman.

Frey’s powerful figures convey a sense of triumph, attesting to a small woman from humble beginnings transcending circumstances to leave a massive and indelible mark. Frey not only constructed work, but forged a support system in which this work could become the primary focus for her external world. With her Oakland home as its epicenter, this constructed reality remained a realm in which Frey could fully and expansively immerse herself throughout her career.